They are right in the effect. However, you never see anyone take it to the next step. Do we NEED to market to be THAT liquid?

We can't really know the answer to this. The applications that would benefit from instant liquidity haven't been developed because instant liquidity has not been available.

Maybe there are some true killer applications for this that just need a few more years of HFT-provided instant liquidity for someone get around to inventing, and once they do, we'll all wonder how people could even pay their bills under the old system let alone live their lives to the full.

We can't see it but we can observe it, most significantly our skin reacts to it. The point of weirdness with the 2D example is that the third dimension is fundamentally unobservable, not that it's simply tricky to observe.

TSA is a place where money goes to be spent on the premise that spending money on things which do nothing is better than doing nothing, even if the outcomes are the same.

It that were only the case it wouldn't be so much of an issue.

One billion dollars of pork is just one billion dollars of pork: payouts to the friends of the king, business as usual.

But what they are in fact doing is spending that one billion in order to make the entire rest of the economy less efficient. They are spending one billion so they can make sure another 100 billion is lost or never produced that otherwise would have been.

Or, according to/. earlier today. The people approving the patents are actually doing whatever the fuck else they want, instead of their job, and getting paid for it.

Which may be rational enough. Patent examiners are educated, intelligent people and they are inside the patent system so they know it well. They probably realize what a complete and unmitigated disaster it is from end to end and figure they have better things to do with their lives than try to polish a turd.

Cheer up and take heart in the fact that even in these tough times of austerity they did at least commit to buying 58 more Joint Strike Fighters for $12.4 billion. Cut down on sicence and buy more flying lemons, at least they have a sound strategy.

That $12.4 billion buys them the continued good will of the world's strongest military power. It's not really about the Australian air force, it's simply cheap insurance.

My country does the same but only half heartedly tries to claim it's all about strengthening the air force. Hell, if we're really lucky there might actually be some decent jet fighters in it for us in the end. That's not the main point though.

Given the nature of trademarks, DC is pretty much forced to deny such a request since each request granted represents a dilution of the trademark and introduces a small risk of the trademark being lost to DC.

On the other hand it is not clear why their permission is required at all in this case. Trademarks protect against someone other than the trademark owner selling products displaying that mark, but, there is no reason to believe that the intention is to create this statue and then try to sell it to someone as a genuine Superman product. There therefore cannot exist any confusion in the market as to the provenance of the statue since the statue isn't in the market in the first place, and so it doesn't constitute a violation of anyone's trademark.

This would only be an obvious trademark issue if they also intended to create merchandise based upon the statue and then sell that, I don't know if this is the case since as any good slashdotter I never cared to RTFA.

I realize they have the right to stop selling anything to anyone at any time for any reason, but I'm struggling to figure out what their beef with this is.

The value of the Oculus brand is greater the more developers they can snag to work on/with their product, and so the more developers that get their hands on the devkit the better for Oculus. They are limited in how many devkits they can build however and so it is important to Oculus that every single one that they make goes to an actual developer, because that developer increases the brand value. Every devkit that goes to a non-developer is a net loss to Oculus because that is a devkit that did not go to a developer.

This would be different if they were not production constrained but I expect that they are.